This weekend’s Art Focus is on Spanish artist Tania Blanco and her series of Sleep-Drunk Vademecum paintings. The intriguing set of rounded acrylic on wood pieces are her treatise on science and the human condition featuring medical instruments, high precision technology, scientific devices, anatomical models, and clandestine laboratories as her subjects. Some of what she paints is recognizable while some look to be from somewhere in the future and appear to be inspired by a quote from Jean Baudrillard from his doctoral thesis – The System of Objects.

More images after the jump…

“In particular, science fiction demonstrates what we have recognized as the most profound — albeit the most irrational — feature of the modern object, namely its automatism. When it comes down to it, the genre has only ever invented one super-object: the ROBOT…

The robot is a symbolic microcosm of both man and the world, which is to say that it simultaneously replaces both man and the world… A robot that mimicked man to the point where its gestures had a truly human fluidity would create anxiety…
If, for the unconscious, the robot is the perfect object that sums up all the others, this is not simply because it is a simulacrum of man as a functionally efficient being; rather, it is because, though the robot is indeed such a simulacrum, it is not so perfect in this regard as to be man’s double, and because, for all its humanness, it always remains quite visibly an object, and hence a slave. In the last analysis, robots are always slaves.”